Rise of the Transgenics Read Online Free PDF Page B

to
the cot and gently placed her on it. Straightening up, he asked,
“When will we know if it worked? I mean, her memory could be messed
up or her brain...”
    His voice trailed off, but Harry knew what he
meant. Brain damage was a very real possibility and he didn’t want
to contemplate the alternative to total success. “We’ll know when
she wakes up.”

Chapter Two: A Matter Of Life And...
     
     
    As Anastasia slept, Harry watched her closely,
wondering if he’d done the right thing and hoping for the best.
Sitting at the computer, he leaned back in the chair, kept his eyes
on his girlfriend, but the stress of the experiment caught up to
him and he nodded off.
    The early days, they’d been good. Days with
his parents in his hometown of Portland, days of happiness, he
remembered them well. Talks with his parents, experiments at home
and then in a university lab, the joys of learning and discovering
and creating, those happy memories swirled in his subconscious.
    Other memories competed, though, and these
were not happy ones. Shy, withdrawn, weak and mild in temperament,
he’d made the perfect target for bullies to use as a punching bag.
And he hated himself for it.
    The only reason he persevered was due to an
above average intelligence, which had been classified at the genius
level, and the willingness to apply it. Since he proved to be too
bright for regular school, he was allowed to study at home and
experiment as well. It didn’t solve the problem of being weak and
nerdy, but he felt grateful for the opportunity of academic
freedom.
    His parents also served as his bedrock. They
were both researchers, quiet and good people who only wanted the
best for him. Unfortunately, DNA proved to win out over life. In
what would have been Harry’s senior year in high school, his father
died from pancreatic cancer and his mother followed him into death
a short time later.
    Alone now, truly alone, Harry had only his
wits and intelligence to carry him through it all. He’d started his
research in order to perfect a cure for cancer, and had almost
achieved the impossible when he was arrested. Farrell had taken him
in and had broken him out of prison a short time later. “You’re
working for us, kid,” he’d said at the time.
    Taken to New York, he’d met Anastasia, and
through a series of adventures too impossible for the average
person to believe, they’d met creatures. The first enemy was a bear
creature—Ivan—who was a monster and a killer. They’d also met Doug,
a transgenic dog who’d sacrificed himself to save both him and
Anastasia, and the biggest monster of them all, Nurmelev, a warped
genius and scientist.
    It had been Nurmelev’s doing all along. He’d
willingly explained everything he knew about Anastasia. A
prostitute, dying from AIDS, she’d made her way to a hospital in
Kiev. Nurmelev had found her there, and taken her away. He’d
experimented on her, and had turned her into something not quite
human, yet better than human in her own way. Nurmelev’s research
was the reason Harry was trying to undo the damage that the Russian
scientist had caused.
    And he had done so much damage. Along with
the damage, there’d been a lot of deaths, inflicted mainly by Ivan,
the bear-monster. He’d trailed Harry to New York, attacked and
murdered numerous people, and had done so willingly.
    Barely escaping with their lives, Harry,
Doug, and Anastasia had made their way to the Catskill Mountains.
There, Nurmelev had told him tales of the fantastic, tales that
involved mass experimentation subsidized by powerful members of
Russian society.
    Harry had seen firsthand the successes of the
program—Anastasia, for one and Doug, for another—and he’d also seen
the failures. They were horrible mutations that didn’t live very
long once their forms had been altered.
    It was all part of the plan, Nurmelev said,
the plan to build the perfect spy. “The plan itself is not
original,” the scientist had said at the